The title of forefather of today's all-electronic digital computers is usually awarded to ENIAC, which stood for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator. ENIAC was built at the University of Pennsylvania between 1943 and 1945 by two professors, John Mauchly and the 24 year old J. Presper Eckert, who got funding from the war department after promising they could build a machine that would replace all the "computers", meaning the women who were employed calculating the firing tables for the army's artillery guns. The day that Mauchly and Eckert saw the first small piece of ENIAC work, the persons they ran to bring to their lab to show off their progress were some of these female computers (one of whom remarked, "I was astounded that it took all this equipment to multiply 5 by 1000").
ENIAC filled a 20 by 40 foot room, weighed 30 tons, and used more than 18,000 vacuum tubes. Like the Mark I, ENIAC employed paper card readers obtained from IBM (these were a regular product for IBM, as they were a long established part of business accounting machines, IBM's forte). When operating, the ENIAC was silent but you knew it was on as the 18,000 vacuum tubes each generated waste heat like a light bulb and all this heat (174,000 watts of heat) meant that the computer could only be operated in a specially designed room with its own heavy duty air conditioning system.
Even with 18,000 vacuum tubes, ENIAC could only hold 20 numbers at a time. However, thanks to the elimination of moving parts it ran much faster than the Mark I (an IBM accounting computer): a multiplication that required 6 seconds on the Mark I could be performed on ENIAC in 2.8 thousandths of a second. ENIAC's basic clock speed was 100,000 cycles per second. Today's home computers employ clock speeds of 1,000,000,000 cycles per second.
Only the left half of ENIAC is visible in the picture, the right half was basically a mirror image of what's visible.
ENIAC
The title of forefather of today's all-electronic digital computers is usually awarded to ENIAC, which stood for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator. ENIAC was built at the University of Pennsylvania between 1943 and 1945 by two professors, John Mauchly and the 24 year old J. Presper Eckert, who got funding from the war department after promising they could build a machine that would replace all the "computers", meaning the women who were employed calculating the firing tables for the army's artillery guns. The day that Mauchly and Eckert saw the first small piece of ENIAC work, the persons they ran to bring to their lab to show off their progress were some of these female computers (one of whom remarked, "I was astounded that it took all this equipment to multiply 5 by 1000").
ENIAC filled a 20 by 40 foot room, weighed 30 tons, and used more than 18,000 vacuum tubes. Like the Mark I, ENIAC employed paper card readers obtained from IBM (these were a regular product for IBM, as they were a long established part of business accounting machines, IBM's forte). When operating, the ENIAC was silent but you knew it was on as the 18,000 vacuum tubes each generated waste heat like a light bulb and all this heat (174,000 watts of heat) meant that the computer could only be operated in a specially designed room with its own heavy duty air conditioning system.
Even with 18,000 vacuum tubes, ENIAC could only hold 20 numbers at a time. However, thanks to the elimination of moving parts it ran much faster than the Mark I (an IBM accounting computer): a multiplication that required 6 seconds on the Mark I could be performed on ENIAC in 2.8 thousandths of a second. ENIAC's basic clock speed was 100,000 cycles per second. Today's home computers employ clock speeds of 1,000,000,000 cycles per second.
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References:
Kopplin, John. (2002) An illustrated history of computers. Accessed from http://www.computersciencelab.com/ComputerHistory/History.htm